This story was originally published in The Star-Ledger on November 26, 1992.

Sheldon Biber of Morristown describes himself as a poet, comedian, storyteller, social and political satirist and low-budget Renaissance Man.

He got that way, he says, by being an improvisational actor, writer and observer. And a college dropout, electrician's helper, moving man, grocery bagger, computer programmer and "one of the guys who counts pills as they go down the chute for a pharmaceutical company."

All in all, Biber is a performer. In his act, called "A Benefit for the Angry," he tells jokes, recites poetry and spins stories, giving audiences his commentary on American life and politics.

"I consider myself a pretty bright guy," said Biber, who appears in coffeehouses and at poetry readings in North Jersey and New York. "But because of my background, I'm able to see things not as an elitist or a blue collar guy, but as a little of both ... and as neither. It's almost like I'm standing on the sidelines, getting an overview of life ... an anthropological overview."

"I'm funny, but I'm serious," Biber said. "I make people laugh, but I make them think."

Biber has been doing political and social satire since the early '70s.

"Politics is always changing," he tells his audience. "It used to be a chicken in every pot. Then two cars in every garage. Now it's a skeleton in every closet."

And this:

"In politics, they used to to say, 'It's not what you know, it's who you know.' Now they say, 'It's not who you know, but what you know about who you know.' "

With the political upheaval of the late '60s spilling into Watergate, Biber's humor met wide acclaim. He was a regular at The Improvisation in New York, performing there 200 times in his first year, and he performed a number of times at Catch a Rising Star.

"A year past Watergate, my stuff was going over great," he said. "Audiences loved what I did. Then Nixon resigned and Ford took over. People didn't want to hear about it as much. When Ford pardoned Nixon, audiences started to turn off to me. It's like they realized it wasn't just Nixon, it was endemic."

As audiences cooled to his material, Biber admitted he failed to adjust.

"I thought they were rejecting me, not my material, so my tone got more accusatory," he said. "The comics who were coming in ... like Freddie Prince and Jimmy Walker, were changing. And the audiences started changing. I was lost, so I went back to poetry readings and coffeehouses."

He also does assembly programs and creative workshops for children in elementary, middle and high schools.

"The program is called, 'Making words sing and language dance,"' Biber said. "It give kids a feel for language, that use of language can be fun and surprising rather than drudgery."

Biber also does private parties, a performance that puts him in close contact with his audience.

Biber got interested in the performing arts shortly after dropping out of Seton Hall University in the early '60s. He studied improvisational theater for three years in Manhattan with George Morrison, who had ties to the famed Second City troupe, then got involved with a dance company called the Multi- Gravitational Experiment Group.

"I wasn't a dancer, but I worked with them as an idea and concept guy," Biber said. "They danced on scaffolding and on structures hanging from the scaffolding. One of my jobs was to change the structures between acts. I would go out as a stagehand, and they eventually choreographed me working into the act. So I would be out there stage-handing and pretend to fall off a scaffold and catch myself."

Biber next joined an improvisational group called Responsive Scene.

"We would go out and perform on location," he said. "We would do audience participation. The audience would give us ideas, and we would act it out, then someone would say, 'Freeze,' and tell what direction to take the act. For instance, if we started doing a scene about a couple breaking up, someone would say 'Freeze,' and say, 'Show the couple on their first date.'

"Then they might say, 'Show the woman talking to her mother before the first date,' and we would invite that person to come down and play the mother. As the thing played out and the scenes continued to change, we would be directing a cast of audience members. It was very interesting work."

But after years of working in New York's undergound theater, Biber's performing career took a different turn during a visit to Wisconsin for a relative's bar mitzvah.

"This was around 1971, and I was in Milwaukee staying at my cousin's house. Her husband was a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, so one day I walked with him to his office and then began walking around the campus. I saw a group of people picketing the college bookstore.

"They were a group of poets who had published their own books, and the school bookstore wouldn't carry their books. They felt the school should have been more responsive to the community, so they decided to picket. I had nothing else to do, so I joined their picket line.

"A little while later, the bookstore owner comes out and agrees to carry the books. Well, they weren't used to getting what they wanted, so they started making demands on the guy, telling him to put it in writing. Since I was an outsider, I ended up being the mediator, smoothing the whole thing out, and they invited me to a poetry reading the next week."

The poetry reading was at a place on Broadway in Milwaukee. After watching a number of poets, Biber began scribbling out some material he had "rolling around" in his head.

"It was very informal, so I got up there and did some material. They were cracking up. So the first time I performed my act, I was a hit on Broadway ... except I was in the wrong city."

When he returned home, he began going to poetry readings in Greenwich Village and, after about a year, developed an act.

Biber is still finding material in the nation's politics ... going back as far as Watergate.

"I miss Nixon," he tells audiences today. "I admire a president who has the decency to sweat when he lies."